The great room was empty. Silent and majestic, with its gilded mirrors and chandeliers and rows of chairs ranged round the walls as if ready to receive the ghosts of the grand ladies and gentlemen who had chatted here a few short weeks ago, had flirted and laughed and fluttered their fans and danced the minuet in their high-heeled shoes before they made their way up the steps of the guillotine or sought safety in an obscure corner of some foreign land.

But Charles de Marigny had no mind for sentimental recollections just now. He strode across the room to the great central window and threw it open. Like the sudden bursting of a dam, the sound of the surging crowd rose in a strident cadence. Monseigneur stepped out on the balcony and looked down on them. How ugly they were! Dirty, unkempt, clad for the most part in filthy rags! He loathed them! Oh! how he loathed them! The men! The women! Those half-naked, unwashed children! Were they human at all? In the olden days he would have classed all that rabble as lower and of less consequence than his cattle or his dogs.

He stood there for quite a few moments looking at them, his arms resting on the marble balustrade, the pistol in his hand. They had come to a standstill in the vast forecourt and were evidently debating what to do next. Then a man's figure detached itself from the rest. he wore an old military coat, one of the sleeves of which was empty and fastened to a button on his chest. He wore shoes and stockings, but his head was bare, and his hair was the colour of a horse-chestnut when it bursts its green prickly shell.

There was something vaguely familiar in the face, those dark eyes and chiselled features, which recreated in Monseigneur's memory a vision out of the past - a boy half naked, with straight young back and firm limbs standing at the whipping post, while he and Hélène de Beauregard looked on rather amused. Hélène had put up her lorgnette and compared him to a rebel angel. He looked more like a demon now.

He strode across the forecourt and up the perron. Two others, more swinish than the rest, followed him. Charles de Marigny watched them. No one had caught sight of him yet, for the balcony was thirty feet from the ground and twenty from the top of the perron. The three men came to a halt in front of the great wrought-iron and gilded gates.

Pierre whispered to Monseigneur:

"Good thought I had of locking them. They'd want a cannon to break them open."

The men, seeing that the gates were locked, appeared to hesitate, and suddenly the man with the empty sleeve looked up.

"Marigny!" he called out and pointed to the balcony. The crowd at once gazed upward. The say Monseigneur. The shouted, "Assassin! Open the gates!" The women waved their arms; the men shook menacing fists. But Charles de Marigny remained motionless and detached, with an expression of withering scorn on his pale, aristocratic face.

"Open the gates, Marigny," André Vallon commanded. "The people here want a talk with you."

De Marigny's sole response was a peremptory:

"Get out of there! All of you, get out!"

"Don't be a fool, Marigny!" André retorted loudly. "The people will not stand your arrogance. They have come to speak with you, and speak with you they will, if they have to pull down these stone walls about your ears."

"Get out!" Charles de Marigny called out in reply. "The gates through which you came are open! Get out!"

"Open the gates!" they all shouted.

"Get out!"

The tumult was waxing fast and furious down below. murmurs had long since turned to raucous shouts, in which the words, "Traitor! Tyrant! Death!" came clearer than the rest. But "Death!" clearest of all. The Abbé Rosemonde tried in his feeble way to restrain Monseigneur, but Charles de Marigny shook himself free with a loud oath from the kindly hand on his shoulder.

"Open the gates!" André's voice rose above that of the others, and Tarbot and Molé, like a pair of savage dogs on the leash, cried out, "Open the gates or we'll burst them open!" Whereat a boy's voice in the crowd rose shrilly:

"If we burst them open there'll be no talking: only death for the traitor."

"Death! Traitor! Assassin!"

"The guillotine!"

Pierre's teeth were chattering with terror. He kept on murmuring, as if to give himself courage: "They can't burst them open! They can't! They'd want a cannon!"

Charles de Marigny drew himself up. Only his hand now, the one which held the pistol, rested on the marble balustrade. He wanted them to see him better, to see the contempt with which he regarded them and their futile efforts to intimidate him. he turned half away from the balcony as if that rabble down there was not even worth a glance. He shrugged ostentatiously when the words, "Assassin! the guillotine!" rose more and more insistently from below.

"Let us go back, M. l'Abbé," he said calmly, "and see what Aurore is doing. When these muckworms are tired of shouting they'll clear out fast enough."

As far as he was concerned that was all! Rabble! riffraff! the scum of humanity! That is what they were! And trying to frighten him? Ludicrous, of course! Contemptible! What a fool to have brought his pistol! As if those cravens would ever dare-

A simultaneous cry from the Abbé and Pierre caused him to swing back suddenly.

The man with the empty sleeve had clambered up to the balcony. With the aid of projections in the stonework and the age-old ivy which, untended, had spread over the wall, he had pulled himself up. Tarbot and Molé were following him, but he, André, had got there first. One arm can be as good as two when fury whips up the blood. With the aid of his one arm and a sinewy pair of legs he was soon over the balustrade, even before the cry of alarm spent itself in the old priest's throat.

Monseigneur swung round. The pistol was in his hand, even with André's head.

"Another step and I shoot!" he called.

"Shoot and be damned!" André retorted, and with a bound was on the floor of the balcony. His arm shot out; his fingers, hard as steel, closed round De Marigny's wrist and forced his arm up, up, and back from the shoulder. The pistol went off with a loud report and then dropped from the nerveless hand to the ground.

From the crowd below came an infuriated yell.

"A moi, Pierre!" Charles de Marigny shouted. And then, "Let go my arm, canaille!"

Before Pierre could come to his master's rescue, Tarbot and Molé were over the balustrade, too, and onto him. They took no notice of the Curé, for he had fallen on his knees, poor old man! and was imploring God to protect Monseigneur; but they held Pierre down while André forced De Marigny, step by step, back into the room. Like a vise, that one hand of his was nearly wrenching the upturned arm out of its socket.

"Mon Dieu, ayez pitié!" the priest murmured fervently, whilst Monseigneur, though half swooning with pain, reiterated obstinately, "Canaille! Canaille! Get out!"

The crowd, baulked of the sight of their enemy, had resumed their cry of "Assassin!" A few of them, more vigorous than the others, tried to follow their leader's example by climbing up the ivy-covered wall. The other's shouted, "Open the gate!" whereupon Molé, the wheelwright, seized Pierre by the arm and said curtly:

"You hear them, citizen? Come and open the gate."

"Pierre, I forbid you," Monseigneur attempted to command, but Molé had already marched Pierre out through the door, while André, step by step, pushed De Marigny back into the room.

When he had got him right over to the other end, with his back to the door of the small boudoir, he released his arm. It fell, nerveless and numb. Obviously the man was in great pain, but pride kept him on his feet. Obstinate and arrogant he was; he could be cruel, too, where his dignity was at stake; but he was no coward, either morally or physically. He did not regret the firing of the cottages, that act of madness which had brought this yelling horde about his ears. He felt faint and giddy, but with a mighty effort he kept himself upright. There was a chair close by, but he would not allow himself to sing into it, and even while André stood towering above him like a statue of wrath and vengeance, his lips continued to murmur mechanically, "Canaille! Get out!"

André gave a contemptuous shrug:

"Canaille we are," he said with a sneer, "that's understood, but we are a canaille who to-day demand justice. you have committed an outrage which calls to Heaven for vengeance, and we have come here to show you that we mean to get it."

"Murder, I suppose?" De Marigny said coldly.

"Killing is no murder when justice demands it. A few hours ago two defenceless women and a crowd of children were turned out of their homes by your orders. My mother gave up her life to rescue the few belongings of a poor widow and her children. As sure as that I hold your worthless life in my hands, her death is at your door. Killing is no murder, Marigny, when it means justice."

Still De Marigny did not flinch. He made no reply, and for a few seconds they stood facing each other, these two men, each the product of his own upbringing and of his century; each imbued with the passion and cruelty of men when they defend what they hold most dear. Charles de Marigny, unbending and imperious, seemed at this moment to be entrenched within the last outpost of his caste, and to be safeguarding his right of property and the privileges of his birth. Immaculately dressed, his hair carefully powdered, his fine linen scarcely disarranged even after a hand-to-hand struggle with this renegade, his pale face betrayed no emotion, only a withering contempt. And André Vallon, the typical child of this bloody revolution, the son of a people who for generations had suffered and toiled like beasts of burden and looked with patient, submissive eyes on the pomp and luxury that never could be theirs; who had never eaten their fill while others feasted; who had wallowed in poverty and ignorance with hardly the promise of Heaven to save them from despair: André with shabby coat and empty sleeve, with glowing eyes and heart overflowing with resentment for past tyranny and unavenged wrongs, André stood for those stirrings which men like Rousseau had first infused into their blood. And as De Marigny worshipped privilege, so did these youngsters worship at the shrine of the newly discovered goddess, Liberty. A new dawn had arisen for them, and they fell on their faces and adored. They ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. They learned and they pondered, and from out the depths of their soul they evolved the consciousness of the dignity of man.

"Canaille we are!" he had thrown back the challenge in De Marigny's face: "low, unwashed, and ignorant, but men for all that. For centuries your cast denied us the right to live as we desired, to share in what goodness the world holds - the right to hold our homes sacred, our wives and daughters inviolate. But now we are your masters at last. We're butchered, we've despoiled, we've killed, but the measure of justice is not yet full. Hundreds of you have mounted the guillotine, and hundreds more shall do the same until we get what we demand - justice!"

All that he said and more, while Charles de Marigny's face expressed nothing but disgust at being in such close contact with this filthy horde.